The moment Tegan stood up for herself and became a hero

By Miranda Devine

FEW QUESTION the law that suppresses rape victims' identities. It has been seen as protecting their privacy and, by implication, concealing their shame.

But in one impulsive, heroic moment last week, 18-year-old Tegan Wagner threw away that legal protection and revealed to the world her face and her name.

"We're not ashamed of what happened to us," she said.

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Four years ago, Wagner, then 14, was raped by brothers MSK, 27, and MAK, 26, in their Ashfield home. The two men and their younger brothers MMK, 19, and MRK, 21, are already in jail for gang-raping two other girls at knifepoint.

None of the Pakistan-born brothers, who have identical first names, can be identified because two were minors at the time. Police have evidence that other victims of the brothers have not come forward.

Standing in the NSW Supreme Court last week after MSK and MAK were sentenced, Wagner yelled: "F--- you, go to hell, mate."

"I'd like to say, 'Have fun in prison, boys, I won," she told reporters, as she waived her right to anonymity.

"We're not telling people so they know we've been raped," she told Channel Nine's A Current Affair on Thursday night.

"We're telling people so other victims know they have support . . . to just show that you need to be confident if you're a rape victim, especially from these boys. You need to come forward. We all need to be strong and stick together and convict these people."

Sitting alongside Wagner was Cassie Hamim, who was 13 in 2002 when she was lured home by the brothers and raped. It was just a month after Wagner's ordeal.

Inspired by Wagner last week, Hamim, too, waived her right to anonymity. "Tegan's grown stronger," she said. "I'm proud of her. I realise I need to be strong and move on."

Hamim also said that her Muslim father was "disgusted" by the fact the rapists used their religion in court as an excuse.

MSK, a married Australian citizen and one of seven brothers who migrated to Australia in 1997, blamed cultural misunderstanding for his actions, claiming his upbringing in a small Muslim village in Pakistan taught him he had the right to rape promiscuous girls. Wagner qualified as promiscuous, he told an earlier hearing, because she did not wear a headscarf and had come to his house unchaperoned.

But Justice Peter Hidden dismissed this excuse.

"He must have had sufficient exposure to the Australian way of life to be aware the place occupied by women in the traditional culture of his area of origin is far removed from our social norms."

Despite Wagner's elation after last week's sentencing, the result was more symbolic than satisfying. MSK's jail term was increased by five years and MAK's by two.

"It is as if there is some kind of discount if you do many rapes," Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen said on Friday.

But Cunneen, who ran this prosecution and several other successful gang-rape trials, said she was proud of Wagner and Hamim.

"It is wonderful how they realise in their generation that no shame attaches to being raped. Part of the idea that [rape victims] not be named is the residual idea that they are also somehow to blame . . . that it remains a stain on their character."

Cunneen's compassion for the victims ensured they persevered through long, arduous legal processes.

But she has suffered through the perception by some colleagues that she has become too involved with a cultural issue that makes them uncomfortable: a series of sexual assaults in Sydney in which most perpetrators were Muslim men who regarded non-Muslim women as fair game.

To some in the legal establishment she prosecuted these men too aggressively, advocated for the victims too passionately and received too much publicity. But in the eyes of Wagner and Hamim, Cunneen helped them achieve justice, and protected other women from suffering as they did.

Together, victims and prosecutor have achieved a profound shift in the perception of rape victims, now seen as heroes rather than shamed victims.

When male vanity comes to a head

WELL, it shows how many people actually read The Monthly, Australia's latest leaden left-wing magazine of "ideas" that was supposed to be like nothing that had gone before.

It took four months for anyone to notice that publisher Morry Schwartz, the Melbourne property developer, had superimposed his own head onto the body of Vanity Fair's editor Graydon Carter in the December issue of The Monthly.

The photograph is one Carter uses to accompany his editor's letter each month and features him in groovy jeans, open-necked shirt and jacket, lounging casually against a shiny conference table, ashtray in foreground, Manhattan skyline beyond. But now there is Schwartz's head.

A Felicity Dawson, of Tasmania, has written to Vanity Fair this month to point out the "rip-off". Given right of reply by the magazine, Schwartz, 58, responded: "What man wouldn't want to stick his head on Carter's elegant body."

Ew.

Back when Carter used to be funny, before he got captured by Hollywood and fixated on George Bush, back when he ran the hilarious satirical magazine Spy, he used to have a feature called "Log Rolling In Our Time".

Schwartz's suck up would have made him a prime candidate. But whether or not Carter, 57, brands him a "short fingered vulgarian", as he once famously described that other filthy rich property developer, Donald Trump, will presumably depend on whether Schwartz behaves himself on his trip to New York this month with his art dealer wife, Anna. "I hope to . . . give the VF people an opportunity to see my body," said Schwartz.